As each day passes into years I usually have never bothered to look back at what happened in them. Sure I’ve often stopped to remember particular incidents, usually they fall into either ‘good memories’ and ‘bad memories’ but how many of those happen in a year? For a relatively boring son of a bitch like me, not many.
Or at least not many that I pay any attention to and I think I should explain this, just in case you ever meet me, or indeed if you already know me (I know who you are!) A lot of the things that happen to me I don’t really think about as being anything out of the ordinary. To my closest friends I often lament how boring and dull my life is; a mountain of debt, no significant other combined with the daily grind of finding the money to pay the bills, putting up with work when you know you would rather do something else but no real idea what and no sign that things will change any time soon. If anything I really do walk around in a bit of a vacuum, my head is usually filled with thousand and one questions that I’m asking myself that I don’t tend to think that most of the things that happen to me are unusual.
A number of years ago, while I was giving my usual, “Oh my life is so fucking boring!” rant, close friends advised me to write a diary of what happened to me over the course of a year. They assured me it would be a best seller, the sort of thing they’d make a TV programme out of. I wish I had listened to them, when I look at what Biographies are selling on Amazon
Ideal about a small time drug dealer who never seems to leave the house and has friends called ‘cartoon head’ and ‘Psycho Paul’, his drug supplier is a local cop who is also shagging his girlfriend, his brother lives in the airing cupboard and as far as I can make out there have been 2 people killed in the flat and no one seems to give a shit! I actually think my life is more interesting than that and I’m sure the dope heads that the BBC has spent license payers money on creating this garbage for would prefer their mind numbing entertainment to at least have better looking characters than Jack Vegas! He’s hardly a role model unless they’re subliminally sending out the message, “Kids, don’t take drugs or you’ll end up like this (very rich) fat bastard”
Anyway, taking all that into account back to my original train of thought, which was recalling the past. I’m guilty of trying to block out those things that I so desperately want to remember. Like my grand father, I don’t remember him much now and I struggle to recall the good times I had with him before he died. For the rest of the family there were few good memories, he was a violent drunk and although I witnessed it, I was too young to remember. I only really got to know him in perhaps the last 8 or 9 years of his life when he was just an old man whose life revolved around working in order to have a drink at the end of the day. In those days I can only remember the times with him as being fun times, so it’s hard when everyone else in the family remembers him with such malice. Of course I’m not happy that he beat my Gran and my mum but it’s also hard to feel real anger for something that happened before you were born, or maybe I really am a cold hearted son of a bitch? I really don’t think I am. I sometimes think of my grandfather and usually when I do I cry and I hate myself because I never cried at his funeral while everyone who claimed to hate him wept buckets.
I logged onto a forum I was quite active in a while ago. Whilst having a look at the threads I noticed the profile of a friend who I haven’t spoken to in a number of years, she had a link to photos of her son. I can’t begin to describe the mix of emotions I felt watching the slide show, especially when she appeared in one of them. I cried and decided there was no point trying to stop, so I let the tears flow as I realised I had been a stubborn fool who, having discovered he had no idea about his feelings, decided the best thing to do was try and lose them by blocking them out and the best way to do that was just not to stay in touch with her. Then when she met a new guy and fell in love there was no point keeping those feelings but for some reason I couldn’t get rid of them so I ignored them. Then of course there was the birth of her son; How do you tell a woman that the happiest moment in her life also happens to be one of the worst in yours? You have the elation of knowing that a treasure has just been born to someone and it’s a horrible jealousy that stops you feeling the way you want to feel because a tiny bit of you wants that treasure to have been shared between you and her, not her and the ‘other guy’.
I wonder sometimes if I don’t use his name when I talk to her if she’d notice? Yes, that’s right, in the last month or so we have started to chat again. The boss came round month or so ago with forms for us to update our ‘death in service’ benefit. I had originally named her as my beneficiary and I thought to myself that it was good I hadn’t died in the last year or so as she had moved to Hull and I didn’t trust work to try and track her down! Trying to forget about her is like trying to forget to breathe. I can’t do it, no matter how hard I try, so I have to learn to deal with it. Of course if I hadn’t spent so long with the shrink I probably still wouldn’t know this and instead would be busy torturing myself from the inside out.
I will now refer to time as BS (before shrink) and AS (after shrink). BS I think I was afraid to look back as I didn’t know what to do with all the feelings I had inside me. Now, AS I’m preparing to deal with them, be they good or bad. I think, however mundane it might sound, that this will be exciting =)
Today’s song is called Forever Young by an Australian band called Youth Group Whenever I hear it I always think about Maryke. I sometimes wonder if she ever thought about me back when we weren’t in contact but you know if you ask people will always say yes, even if they mean no.
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